Tonkin Resigns As U Of H Head

He'll Remain President For A Year

At age 57, Humphrey Tonkin -- Shakespearean scholar, linguist, college president, teacher, family man -- has decided he has too many things to do and too little time.

Something had to give, and Wednesday he announced that it would be his job: After leading the University of Hartford through some of its most difficult times, Tonkin will relinquish the post next June 30 that he will have held for nearly a decade.

He will remain at the 40-year-old university and teach as a full, tenured professor in the humanities department.

The committee that will search for a new president will be headed by Peter Eio, president of LEGO Systems Inc. of Enfield and vice chairman of the university's board of regents.

The committee's priority, Eio said Wednesday, will be to bring in a top-notch fund-raiser -- someone who can be a rainmaker for a 10-year, $150 million capital campaign the cash-strapped university is launching this fall.

But Eio and other board members also stressed that fund-raising talent must not come at the expense of academic credentials.

``[Academics] is what our product is,'' said G. Robert O'Brien, chairman of the university's board of regents. ``Not keeping up academic excellence would be a disaster.''

Tonkin, a Harvard- and Cambridge-educated scholar who succeeded Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in 1989, was hired to polish the school's academic reputation. But his arrival coincided with Connecticut's economic free-fall, and he and the university have been paying ever since for its high rate of spending, particularly for construction, during the early 1980s.

Although Tonkin said he is proud of the work he has done to stabilize the university's finances -- after running a deficit that hit $5 million in 1994, it expects to balance its annual operating budget by next June -- he acknowledges that his successor may need to be someone with new skills.

``It is true I was brought in to raise the academics and aspirations of the university,'' he said. ``I think actually that as we look to the future, there will be a need for other qualifications -- perhaps some different than mine.''

Tonkin is leaving next year, in part, because he doesn't want to step down in the middle of the 10-year, fund-raising effort. But his overriding reasons are more personal.

``Being president is a job that takes every waking hour -- one even dreams about it,'' said Tonkin, a spare, kinetic Englishman whose passions run from the invented language Esperanto to the distinct style of the Elizabethans.

The job, and its relentless fund-raising responsibilities, left little time for his scholarly pursuits. It also took him away from his family -- a situation he found particularly troubling last March when his 16-year-old stepdaughter was severely injured in an automobile accident. One of her legs had to be amputated below the knee.

``When something like that comes out of the blue,'' he said, ``you have acute feelings of frustration.'' She has recovered now, but the experience clearly played a role in Tonkin's decision to leave.

Tonkin's departure comes as the school not only faces the prospect of bolstering its meager $35 million endowment, but remains enmeshed in a legal battle between the university and its art school over control of the art school's $6 million endowment.

The standoff, which Tonkin calls a ``family dispute of the classic kind,'' was not a factor in his decision to leave, he and other university officials said.

The art school, one of nine schools at the university, maintains it should be able to control its own fund- raising, while the university's board of regents says it should control all aspects of the university's finances.

Timothy J. Moynihan, president of the Greater Hartford Chamber of Commerce, said resolving the lawsuit would benefit ``the whole community'' and is a key to the university's future.

``It's troublesome to the trustees on both sides of that issue,'' Moynihan said.``It's taken away energy, resources and attention that should be paid to the future of the university.''

The art school imbroglio is related to the primary challenge faced by the University of Hartford and other private universities like it: increasing its endowment at a time when rising tuition costs are forcing more and more students to rely on financial aid to attend college.

Except for a handful of institutions such as Harvard, Yale and other schools of national stature, there is unprecedented competition for students, for retaining good faculty and for developing outside sources of revenue, said David R. Merkowitz, director of public affairs for the American Council on Education, based in Washington, D.C.

At the University of Hartford, the tough economic times forced the school to cut about 20 percent of its staff and 5 percent of its faculty and intensified the effort to attract students. Nearly nine in 10 of those who apply to the school are accepted.